Digital retail traffic saw a 19 per cent growth in payment transaction volumes compared to holiday shopping period 2017 between Thanksgiving (22 November) and Cyber Monday (26 November).

This indicates that holiday shopping is moving further online and consumers continue to shun in-store experiences in favour of holiday sofa surfing, according to ThreatMetrix.

The findings were based on transactions seen on the company’s Digital Identity Network during real-time analysis of fraudulent online payments, logins and new account applications. The network analyses 40 billion transactions a year, across over 165,000 websites and mobile applications globally.

It saw a growth in mobile payment transactions for retail from 52 per cent in 2017 to 59 per cent in 2018, suggesting that consumers are shopping using the convenience of a mobile device.

As expected, average basket values across digital retail traffic were significantly higher on key holiday shopping days in comparison to normal. However, this was also true for fraudulent transactions.

The average basket value of rejected transactions was 2.7 times as high as the basket value of good transactions, indicating that fraudsters have been capitalising on the busier holiday period to attempt to hide larger value fraudulent transactions.

Automated bot attacks were the key attack vector over the holiday shopping week, according to ThreatMetrix.

One payment platform saw a high volume of bot attacks using session replay during the holiday shopping period, with these attacks originating in the US and Vietnam. These attacks were likely testing stolen credit card credentials, potentially to use in further targeted fraud attacks during the holiday shopping period.

The network analysis also found another organisation which experienced a large bot attack targeting logins, testing 20 million stolen account credentials, beginning on Cyber Monday and continuing throughout the week. These bots originated in the US, Vietnam and China.

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